Monday, June 18, 2012

Well, another 2 weeks worth of garage sale treasures are ready to post. I keep having a bum week with not enough to make it post worthy, and then a good week. If that pattern continues this week will be the bum week. :( Anyway, onto the goods....

Found this box of classroom crayons (800 crayons!) for $5. The Thomas coloring books were $.50 a piece and brand new. I bought 8 of them making it $4 total. I donated the crayons and 4 books to our church. One book went to my friend, and the other 3 are here and in use. The movies were $1 a piece and I was pretty excited about all of them. I own the Christy TV series on DVD and was excited to find these extras that were made after. A lot of the actors/actresses are different, but I'll get over it. Your, Mine, and Ours...the Lucille Ball version (love), Holiday Inn...love these old musicals. I was really excited about Julie and Julia....I really wanted to keep it for myself (I think a lot of bloggers like this movie), but I sent it to my lovely sister-in-law. She let me borrow her copy and my kids destroyed it. I'm glad that I was able to replace it with one in pristine condition for only $1 rather than paying full price for it.

Found a sale with some boy toys. Those are hard to come by and my little guys always get so upset when they don't get anything. I found this cool ramp for their hot wheels sized cars for $2, then all the other miscellaneous cars were another $1.50. The hot wheels puzzle was $.25

Bag of baby toys/rattles for $1.00

Love this set of nesting baskets for $7 the big ones are HUGE. All of these are already in use in some capacity all over the house. lol

That completes the bum week of sales. Still got some fun stuff just not enough to be post worthy in my opinion. GRAND TOTAL: $26.75

This week was great....well, at least I think it was. I found all these clothes for Annabelle for $15. The range in size goes from 5 to 6x. So hard to find clothing that size at a garage sale, let alone for the price I am willing to pay. I paid $15 total for everything in both these pictures! I was a very happy person. I don't even know what all is in here....everything from pants, dresses, and shirts all the way to pjs, shoes, and a pink snuggie (Annab loves blankets).

I was also very excited to find my first big gift. This will most likely be for Annabs birthday. She was with me when I bought this, and she did pick out a couple to play with now, but the rest are being saved until September. This was a HUGE lot with TONS of animals. I don't know how I feel about her knowing what she's getting, but the general consensus around here is that it isn't really that big of a deal. $20 for all.

Life jacket for Annabelle was 1.00, all the beanies were free. The 3 cats will be for Annabelle's stocking. The goose and the duck will go with our habitat animals, and the dragon....well, I'm not sure where he ended up. lol. The dance leotard is BEAUTIFUL and would've easily cost me $60 brand new and I got it for $2! This will fit Annabelle all next year for her dance classes.

Just a close-up of the quality of the of the beautiful skirt.....lovely.

Found such great prices on books this week. This picture was $3, the Hop on Pop was $1 of that.

The workbooks which Asa will use were .25 a piece. The other books were 3 for $1.00. Funny story: At one sale I only found 4 books that I wanted. The lady told me to go pick out 2 more or put the other one back. I said, can't I just give you .50 for this one book? She was so confused....lol, she eventually agreed to that after I said, you would rather take less for this book when someone picks it out for 3 for $1.00 (assuming someone else would buy it) than to take .50 for it right now? I still don't think she got it.....it was early, maybe she hadn't had any coffee yet. lol

Puzzles for the boys $1.00. I'm not particularly fond of Barney, but they watch him occasionally and like him so I knew they would enjoy the puzzle. Also a couple cars for them. $1.50 (they're a pretty good size so I paid the .75 price...even though I would've only had .25 on them at my sale lol).

I was excited about these bowls and plates. They've been eating out of Dora bowls and have been wanting something for boys. While washing them Zak (who washed dishes for me cause it's getting harder with my belly for me to wash them) realized the Spiderman plate had a crack in it (so I paid $1 for a bowl...oh well).

Monday, June 4, 2012

Despite the lack of school posts we have been plugging along. We are mostly finished with the Rainforest portion of Animal Worlds and will be moving onto the Ocean portion. After that we will have successfully completed AW (minus the polar region)!! It will feel good to know that we stuck it out and completed a core.....now I know we can do it, it will be so much nicer in the upcoming years. I think that we (Annabelle and I) have learned so much about each other this year that all our upcoming homeschool years will benefit from it.

We talked a lot about ants the past few weeks. This wasn't a part of the curriculum, but the animals that they were studying didn't have lapbooks readily available for them. Ants did and since we have them in our house AND the rainforest portion talks a lot about army ants and leafcutters I thought it would fit right in. We did a notebook page study I just haven't put it together yet. Annabelle was truly fascinated with ants....but still doesn't like them. lol This is her pink ant that she made....it is obviously the queen, can't you tell? :)

We talked about a lot of tropical birds, toucans in particular. We bought a whole bunch of fruit ( I do realize that raspberries and apples aren't tropical, but those are the only fruits I knew Annabelle would eat) and had a taste test.

Annabelle's reaction to having to taste at least one of every fruit.....not too happy. lol

The boys LOVED it! They ate the whole tray. I learned that I do not know how to cut a mango. :)

We finished up our adventure reading for the Rainforest unit. The book is about finding an undiscovered butterfly so that a wealthy man will buy that portion of the rainforest and save it from being cut down.

At the end of the book I thought it would be fun if Annabelle got to make her own 'undiscovered' butterfly. May present to you the Rapunzel butterfly..... :)

We had this little guy come and visit us at our door one day. We've been talking about dragonflies and butterflies a lot so this was a nice surprise.....it was a cold morning so it hadn't warmed up yet and was easy to catch.

We observed him and then let him go.

We've also been working through our Horizons K math and All About Reading and Spelling Level 1. It really is assisting her in becoming a stronger reader.....

.....as well as helping her enjoy reading a little bit more. Still having her bad attitude show up, but it is becoming less and less a problem......

....she can read great, she just has to work at it....and she really dislikes working at something. :) Daily reading out of the Sonlight I Can Read It readers.

We have started her 1st grade science, Apologia Astronomy. I LOVE this
curriculum....and she is really liking it too. They have a lot of hands
on activities which she really enjoys. We are enjoying the note
booking portion of it too.

We made a model of Stonehenge and talked about what it may have been used for (telling of the seasons, when to plant, time of day)....

I think that it turned out decent. lol

This was our balloon model of the solar system (not really to scale...the sun would be a lot bigger than that). It will be used for review of the planet names/order of the planets. She really enjoyed this.

Happily doing some Bible verse copy work for her notebook. I was surprised that she liked doing this....normally she doesn't like to write at all.

I would say that what Annabelle is enjoying the most right now is her Bible studies. We are using Bible Study Guide for All Ages. I am pleased with it, I really like that it will grow with us.

This great printout of the genealogy of Jacob can be found at a great blog Our Country Road This has really helped us with learning the names of the sons of Jacob. She looks forward to singing the song every morning and pointing out the people on the chart.

Working on the student page. The Discover the Bible portion is so interactive and asks her tons of questions during the actual story so I know that she is listening and understanding.

The boys joined us for one of our crafts. They really wanted to get in on the coat of many colors action. :)

Asa, Silas, and Annabelle. Annabelle just wanted to do the coat and color the Joseph during some of our reading.

We talked about showing favoritism. I gave Silas a sucker before I read the Bible story and told him how much I loved him and how glad God had given him to me (right in front of Annab and Asa), then proceeded to go to read. There was an immediate uproar. We talked about how that made them feel, and what should be done about those feelings. After we talked I gave them each a sucker and told them the same thing I told Silas. It especially hit home with Annabelle....it is really cool to see these concepts click with her.

Our second lesson moved onto Joseph being sold into slavery. This lesson also dealt with lying (which always needs some reinforcement in our house).

This was our Joseph in the pit craft. We've done this before, but it's an easy and fun one to revisit.

This is just Annabelle who was really excited about the new desk that I found for her at a garage sale for only $2! She says she is in 'real' school now. lol :)

That is what we've been up to the last few weeks in May. I can officially say that Annabelle is now in between K and 1st grade.....she will tell you that she is in 1st grade though. lol My postings will probably be a little more sporadic like this during the summer. We are really only schooling 3 days a week (sometimes 4), and with the weather being so nice it is hard to sit down and blog sometimes. :) But I will try to post something 1-2 times a week. I hope that everyone else is having a wonderful warm season so far! Happy blogging.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Sorry that I haven't posted recently. We've been super busy and had vacation. Lots of fun things going on around here! Anyway, no excuses right?!

So I found a really nice car seat for our new little one. We had a garage sale last year and sold all of our baby stuff and then promptly turned around and became pregnant again so we don't have much (it's ok....I really want to go with the minimalist approach this last time around). This is a really nice infant seat and it came with the base for $20.

Some random findings. I paid way too much money for the Safari Gears that ended up being incomplete (I dislike it when people sell incomplete things for a high price and don't disclose that it's incomplete!). I wouldn't have minded paying the $3 for the complete set, but it wasn't complete. :/ Oh well, live and learn. The magnetic trucks were also $3 (there are a lot more pieces, but the boys were playing with them). Books were .50 a piece. Movies were $1.00

Bath toy collector (turtle) was .25 and the rock crystal growing thing was .50 and complete. I was pretty happy with that.

I found 3 shirts for me at .75 a piece. A few random pieces for Annabelle at .25 a piece, and a pair of pjs for .50. I could've sworn those jammies said 4T, but after I washed them I realized they said 3T....poor Asa.

A few weeks ago I found some great NB girl clothes so this week I bought some cute NB boy clothes. This entire picture was $4.00

This is my favorite buy of this particular week at $10. It looks really nice in our school room!

GRAND TOTAL: Around $50.....The rug and the carseat are what did me in.

This past week was fun too. Didn't find a ton of stuff, but at least it was easy on the budget. I only got to go today (Saturday) so that might have helped.

The Lakeshore Learning clock was my favorite find of the day at 2.50. It's really big, and really nice. A What's Inside toy for $4. It was like new and I will probably give it to the baby at Christmas. A couple maternity shirts at $3 a pop.....I normally wouldn't pay that, but I'm pretty desperate for maternity clothes. A boy barbie for Annabelle $1, and some great cubes that I plan on using for school purposes....unfortunately I paid $2 for them....I didn't have the heart to protest after the price was revealed (I don't like sales where nothing is priced).

Books were .50 a piece.

I found this great lot of glass bottles for .50 a piece and some nice receiving blankets for .25 a piece.

GRAND TOTAL: $21.50

I'm linking up to My Life on a Taffy Pull. If you have garage sale treasures that you want to share you should head over there and link up too. :) Happy blogging!

About Me

I am blessed to be a stay at home mom to four beautiful children ages 6, 5, almost 4, and 6 month old. I love my 'job' and even though it can get kind of crazy at times with an infant, 2 Pre-Kers, and a 1st grader I wouldn't change it.
I love to homeschool my kids, and right now my entire focus is concentrated into that.
I love God, and I love life and have a sense of humor that helps me get through it all. I hope that what I write reflects that. Enjoy!